Paul Cézanne ENG

A central participant in the Impressionist decades of the late-nineteenth century—and a close friend of Camille Pissarro’s—Cézanne started from observation and painted in the plein-air tradition. But his most ambitious paintings transcended their optical roots toward scenes of intense spatial uncertainty and dense painterly facture. His representations of fruit and mountains appear both solid and slippery, situated between an experiential illusionism and the more abstracted aspects of modern painting. Cézanne is often considered the figure who bridged Impressionism’s attachment to naturalism with modernism’s penchant for formal abbreviation and experimentation. Challenging the key principles of perspective, Cézanne became the Post-Impressionist artist most revered by the early twentieth-century avant-garde, including Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.

Cézanne was born in Aix-en-Provence on January 19, 1839, to Anne-Elisabeth-Honorine Aubert and Louis-Auguste Cézanne, who initially made a living as a milliner but later co-founded a prosperous bank, the Banque Cézanne et Cabassol, that enriched the family and eventually provided the artist with a large inheritance, absolving him from the need to sell his works. In 1852, Cézanne entered the Collège Bourbon in Aix, where he met the naturalist writer Émile Zola who would remain a friend through the 1880s. Starting in 1857, Cézanne took his first art classes at Aix’s École municipale de dessin. Initially, he followed his father’s demand to become a lawyer and work for the family bank but gave up his legal studies around 1860. In 1859, Louis-Auguste purchased a new, spacious family residence, the Jas de Bouffan, where the family moved soon after, and Cézanne was permitted to decorate the walls of the drawing room with large paintings depicting The Four Seasons and other scenes, among his first ambitious efforts at art making[1].

In April 1861, Cézanne moved to Paris, following Zola. Denied entry into the École des beaux-arts, he studied at the free Académie Suisse instead where he met Camille Pissarro. At the end of the year, somewhat disillusioned, he returned to Aix but moved back to Paris the next year, continuing his studies at the Académie Suisse, where he met the core group of Impressionists, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley included. For the rest of the decade, Cézanne divided his time between Paris and Aix. He submitted works to the Paris Salon every year between 1864 and 1869, all of which were refused. His paintings from this period are dark, moody, and psychologically-laden scenes of modern life, including depictions of murder and sexual violence but also stiff scenes of bourgeois interiors [2]. Sensationalist and beholden to the period’s boulevard press, these paintings developed a unique form of modern life painting, less aloof than Édouard Manet’s modernism and more romantic and psychologically intense. At times painted with a palette knife, they show an especially thick and coarse application of paint. None of these works were seen in public at the time; only the small cadre of Cézanne’s close artistic friends would have seen them. There is no critical response to Cézanne’s early work either, but his writer-friends began to circulate the image of an exceptional outsider artist, willing to rock the status quo. In 1869, Cézanne met his future wife Marie-Hortense Fiquet, then working as a model at the Académie Suisse but a bookbinder by training.

During l’année terrible of 1870-71 – the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune – Cézanne and Fiquet lived in the small village of L’Estaque near Marseille, escaping the frontlines in the north as well as military conscription. Few of Cézanne’s early paintings can be specifically dated during this period (indeed, dating remains a particular challenge for the entire Cézanne corpus, since he rarely signed and dated his paintings), but some include oblique references to this traumatic year in French history.

Cézanne and Fiquet returned to Paris at the end of the Commune, in mid-1871, and their son, Paul Cézanne Jr. was born the following January. Cézanne hid Fiquet and their off-spring from his father and a complex family dynamic ensued. Over the following fifteen years, his father’s financial support was not guaranteed, and the 1870s and early 1880s are likely the most unstable years in Cézanne’s life, at least financially.

Between 1872 and 1874, the young Cézanne family lived north of Paris in Auvers-sur-Oise and Pontoise, Pissarro’s home town. Cézanne made his most Impressionist paintings in those years in close visual communication with the ten-year-older Pissarro [3]. Landscapes now dominate his practice. Although these works evince an Impressionist idiom, they never fully fall for the allure of the instant, atmospheric texture, and the intricacies of filtered light, by then the hallmarks of the new style. Instead, even Cézanne’s most Impressionist works appear dense and belabored, their pictorial emphasis placed firmly on the solidity of the given landscape and an evenness of tone that rarely speaks of a specific moment in time.

In 1874, Pissarro convinced Cézanne to partake in the first Impressionist exhibition that took place in Paris from mid-April to mid-May of 1874, a state-independent exhibition self-organized by the group of artists later known as the Impressionists who had been so often refused by the official Salon [4]. Cézanne showed only two recent landscapes and his take on Manet’s most infamous painting, Olympia of 1863, titling his version boldly A Modern Olympia. Even though few critics wrote about the first Impressionist show, those who did often singled out Cézanne as the strangest painter of the new movement, deriding his art in particular. Even so, unlike most of the other works on display at the exhibition which ended in financial failure, Cézanne managed to sell his The House of the Hanged Man to the adventuresome collector Count Dora, one of his earliest sales. Cézanne also participated in the third Impressionist exhibition of 1877 but had no greater success then. He would not participate in any of the other exhibitions the group staged between 1874 and 1886, which numbered eight in total.

By the late-1870s, Cézanne had developed the style of painting that would come to define his oeuvre at large and that he would refine over the coming years up until the early 1890s. Focused on still-lifes and the Provençal landscape, but also on portraiture, Cézanne devised a technique variously called the « constructive stroke » or the « parallel stroke » , in which he grouped into small fields a set of similar brushmarks in the same color, resulting in a blocky but also highly repetitive form of paint application [5]. Formulated in response to the more orderly and symbolist forms of Impressionist painting devised by Monet and Renoir around 1880 and eventually the rise of Neo-Impressionism, Cézanne settled on a style that appeared at once detached from the real in its strange repetitiveness but also broadly representational, in order to capture the profound and authentic experiences Cézanne sought, poised between past and present, structure and disarray. Repetitive and irresolute at the same time, Cézanne’s technique prompted the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty to speak in 1945 of « Cézanne ‘s Doubt », namely the acute uncertainty and provisional nature with which Cézanne approached the act of representation [6].

Cézanne’s mature paintings ensued, paintings in which fruit appear poised between the second and third dimensions, solid but always about to roll off tables. Aix’s most famous natural site, Mont Sainte-Victoire, appears as if hovering between close visual proximity and extreme distance. In his portraits, Cézanne made his sitters, Fiquet chief among them, appear object-like and remote, yet also strangely present and emotive, despite the complex web of painterly procedures by which they were captured [7].

In the late 1870s, Cézanne reconciled with his father who, in early 1882, had a studio built for his son at the Jas de Bouffan and began to be more accepting of Cézanne’s choice of career and family. After this date, Cézanne spent less and less time in Paris and in the north of France and most of his time in and around Aix, although he passed a few frustrating months painting with Paul Gauguin in Auvers in 1881 [8]. In the following years, in 1882 and 1883 to be precise, Cézanne also painted in the company of Monet and Renoir in L’Estaque, making the early 1880s the years in which Cézanne appeared particularly open to interpictorial dialogue. 1886 would become a crucial year : Cézanne finally married Fiquet in April and, after the publication of L’Œuvre with its thinly veiled references to Cézanne, his friendship with Émile Zola cooled and would soon end. In October of 1886, Cézanne’s father died, securing the painter a substantial inheritance that made him financially secure for the rest of his career.

In the early 1890s, Cézanne added large-scale figure painting to his repertoire, first in the form of five versions of his Card Players and, starting around the mid-1890s, the three large-scale paintings of female bathers known as The Large Bathers[9].

The 1890s is also the decade during which Cézanne became more widely known. In 1890, he displayed three works at Brussels’ Les XX exhibition, and in November 1895, the Parisian dealer Ambroise Vollard, owner of a small gallery, staged the painter’s first one-person exhibition, showing around 50 works. In 1897, the first Cézanne painting entered a museum collection, though not in France : The German curator Hugo von Tschudi acquired a landscape at Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery for the National Gallery in Berlin. By 1900, the art market had discovered Cézanne, and his prices would continue to rise sharply in the ensuing years and decades.

In the 1890s, Cézanne lived mostly apart from his wife and son, spending part-time in Paris and part-time at the Jas de Bouffan, before the property was sold in 1899 after his mother’s death in 1897.

In 1902, Cézanne had a new studio built north of Aix along the Chemin des Lauves ; it is there that The Large Bathers were painted. Cézanne’s paintings of the years before his death are marked by an even greater desire for experimentation in form and finish, often fleeing the visible, although Cézanne kept insisting on painting out-of-doors. He painted more frequently in the open and fluid medium of watercolor than he had ever before [10]. In 1903, he participated for the first time in the Paris Salon d’Automne, and in 1904, a whole room was dedicated there to his paintings. It was around those years that younger painters, especially the Nabis and those propagating the first Fauvist and Cubist tendencies, began to recognize Cézanne as a forebearer. The fellow painter and writer Émile Bernard first visited him in 1904, publishing an influential article about him that year and his memoirs of the painter a few years later [11]. After being caught in a storm in mid-October 1906, Cézanne contracted pneumonia and died a few days later, on October 22, 1906, at the age of 67. Two posthumous retrospectives in 1907—one at Bernheim-Jeune’s gallery in June and the other in two rooms at the Salon d’Automne from early-October and mid-November—began to generate Cézanne’s colossal reputation in the twentieth century.

[1] Lawrence Gowing (ed.), Cézanne: The Early Years 1859–1872 (catalogue d’exposition: London, Paris, Washington, 1988), London, Royal Academy of Arts; Paris: Musée d’Orsay; Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1988.
[2] André Dombrowski, Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2013.
[3] Joachim Pissarro, Pioneering Modern Painting: Cézanne & Pissarro 1865–1885 (catalogue d’exposition: New York, 2005), New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2005 ; T. J. Clark, “Strange Apprentice: T. J. Clark on Pissarro and Cézanne,” London Review of Books 42, no. 19 (8 Octobre 2020).
[4] Sylvie Patry, Anne Robbins, Kimberly Jones, and Mary Morton (eds.), Paris 1874: Inventer l’impressionnisme (catalogue d’exposition: Paris, Washington, 2024), Paris, Musée d’Orsay; Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, 2024.
[5] Theodore Reff, “Cézanne’s Constructive Stroke,” Art Quarterly 25, no. 3 (Fall 1962), 214–27; Lawrence Gowing, “The Logic of Organized Sensation,” in Cézanne: The Late Work (catalogue d’exposition: New York 1977), New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1977, 55–71.
[6] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Le Doute de Cézanne,” in Sens et non-sens (Paris: Gallimard, 1945).
[7] Susan Sidlauskas, Cézanne’s Other: The Portraits of Hortense, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2009; John Elderfield, with Mary Morton and Xavier Rey, Cézanne’s Portraits (catalogue d’exposition: Paris, London, Washington, 2017-18), Paris, Musée d’Orsay; London, National Portrait Gallery; Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art/Princeton University Press, 2017.
[8] Denis Coutagne (ed.), Cézanne et Paris (catalogue d’exposition: Paris, 2011), Paris, Musée du Luxembourg/Éditions de la RMN, 2011.
[9] Nancy Ireson and Barnaby Wright (eds.), Cézanne’s Card Players (catalogue d’exposition: London, 2010), London, The Courtauld Gallery/Paul Holberton, 2010.
[10] Jodi Hauptman (ed.), Cézanne Drawing (catalogue d’exposition: New York, 2021), New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2021; Matthew Simms, Cézanne’s Watercolors: Between Drawing and Painting, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2008.
[11] Émile Bernard, Souvenirs sur Paul Cézanne, Paris, Albert Messein, 1912.